So simply adding photos to your tweets is a great starting place and one that we’ve discussed before as Twitter has rolled out more image-friendly updates. But if you want to take it further than just adding relevant visuals to tweets, design a way to tell a visual story on Twitter. Put together something where the pieces can stand individually- after all, your tweets will be part of your followers’ stream- but when a prospective follower or curious fan looks at your homepage, they also see a cohesive visual story that communicates your campaign or company values, whatever it is that you’re trying to get across.

What does this look like?

Starbucks is great about using their timeline to tell little mini-stories, and they incorporate their fans and followers in them by retweeting their tweets as well. A great example is a recent celebration of National Croissant Day:

This example also takes it further, by integrating Snapchat. (We’ll talk more about expanding to other platforms in just a bit!)

Keeping things to Twitter, look at the timelines of any major brands you admire and ask yourself what makes their presentation successful or unsuccessful; do their visuals feel cohesive? Do they work together towards telling a single story and letting you know what they can do for you? Figure out how you can answer those questions and provide value to your own fans, followers, and customers.

Take it beyond a campaign.

Twitter shouldn’t just be about selling to your audience; using it like a bullhorn to shout at your fans and followers is unlikely to result in a reciprocal, engaged relationship with them. Use your social presence to tell any number of stories about your brand. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Tell the story of how your company came to be

Tell the story of how two companies came together as one in a merger, or the story of a rebranding

Show off company culture: Share spontaneous images your employees take of one another and let them tell daily office stories in their own words

Show off company values: Share the story of a day spent volunteering, or the different charitable things employees do on their own time and how you support them

Tell the story of an event or anniversary of your company

Tell the story of a partnership of two brands or a brand and a celebrity spokesperson around a campaign

All of these are ways to show off the human side of your brand, in addition to giving your employees some storytelling power.

Take it even beyond Twitter.

Go beyond just adding a photo to your tweets and use photos to tell a story not just on Twitter but across platforms: Tailor your story so that it’s told on your Facebook timeline, on your Tumblr, across your Instagram page. You can choose different parts of your story to tell in each place, if that feels more appropriate for your brand. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your narrative as long as you stay true to your brand values and the voice you’re trying to build or strengthen.

One woman even used Pinterest to tell the story of her Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler, which eventually expanded to a presence on other networks and a book. In that case a powerful visual story became a brand.

Test content types constantly.

Finally, use the engagement levels on the types of visual content you use- images with words superimposed on them, images without words but with captions, etc- to plan content types moving forward. And you’ll want to keep testing; your audience’s tastes will most likely shift over time.

Our snapshot reports are a great way to get some quick analytics about a conversation or topic on Twitter, and we want to help you get the most out of them that you can! Here are five ways to make the most of your snapshots:

1. Maximize your results

Take your snapshot as soon as a tweet chat, event, or event session ends to capture the best data possible. Free snapshots include up to 50 Tweets and $20 full snapshots include up to 1,500 Tweets, both from the past couple days (up to one week back in many cases). The longer you wait to run your report, however, the better chance that you’ll miss the best data.

2. Narrow your results

Taking a snapshot of a weekly chat? Use the “since” modifier (example: #RKChat since:2015-01-30 would go in the search bar) to get results from just that day’s chat, and not any anticipatory chatter from the night before. To narrow your search in other ways to get exactly the data you want, check out this full list of advanced operators.

3. Plan your research

Running a few free reports around keywords, topics, or different hashtags can help you narrow your focus and decide which will be worth paying for a full snapshot, or even going Pro if you’ve got that option in your budget.

4. Scope out the competition

A snapshot of an account can give you a quick idea of that account’s recent activity; which tweets are the most retweeted? Is that the same kind of content you should be looking at and sharing? It’s a great jumping off point for planning your content calendar.

5. Scope out influencers

Which brands and personal brands have the best tone and approach to Twitter in your industry? Run a few snapshots to find common threads and use them to enhance your Twitter content strategy moving forward.

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics with our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments, or tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.

“It should always be kept in mind that a large number of visitors can sometimes stem from a significant number of one-time visitors. Of course, all visitors begin as first-time visitors, but if a user only visits your landing page and then quickly moves on, never to return, you are not gaining anything from them. You have no real opportunity to build influence with one-time visitors. With regular visitors, you are able to cultivate a true relationship. Over time, those visitors become invested in your brand and truly care about what you have to say. For this reason, it is vital to consider whether your viewership is based more on one-time visitors or on return visitors who are truly invested in what you have to say.”

“The catch here is that Twitter is taking into account your inactivity. Which presumably means tweets posted at mostly inactive hours will–in a way–be rewarded. We could all be bombarded with midnight brand Tweets in the race to be displayed in the coveted morning recap. Eggs just taste better with a side of subliminal messaging.”

The 72nd annual Golden Globes aired last night and as usual the show didn’t disappoint, and neither did the social activity we tracked in conjunction with mhCarter Consulting and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Yesterday 704k contributors posted 2.4M tweets about the Golden Globes for a unique potential reach of 361M and it wasn’t just the normals live-tweeting the show either; a lot of celebrities weighed in on everything from the winners to what the show should be called, making for an extra entertaining evening. The most retweeted tweets included this from Demi Lovato about Gina Rodriguez’s win for Jane The Virgin:

Ummm just cried. Congratulations to @HereIsGina for your Golden Globe… Way to represent ALL Latinos!!! — Demi Lovato (@ddlovato) January 12, 2015

The golden globes would be much more elegant if they were called the Gold Globes. Watches & medals are gold. Grahams & corrals are golden — Ezra Koenig (@arzE) January 12, 2015

The official Golden Globes Twitter account also encouraged fans to take a look at their Instagram account, where they posted more than a hundred behind-the-scenes photos. With the growing emphasis on visual content marketing, this was a very smart move and the payoff in engagement was huge. Yesterday the Golden Globes Instagram account posted 112 times and received 398k likes and 16k comments. That’s an average of more than 3,500 likes per post!

The most popular photo from the evening features Benedict Cumberbatch and Jennifer Aniston in the Instagram photo booth manned by photographer Ellen von Unwerth:

Already, that photo alone has gotten more than 25k likes! (Instagram event takeaway: Hire a professional photographer to boost the quality of your event snaps, and boost your engagement to boot.)

The most popular hashtags around last night’s show highlight hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and their bit starring Margaret Cho as a North Korean reporter for entirely real publication Movies Wow, in addition to expressing interest in the upcoming film 50 Shades of Grey:

#goldenglobes

#redcarpet

#movieswow

#merylstreep

#margaretcho

#benedictcumberbatch

#50shadesofgrey

#cecilbdemilleaward

#amypoehler

#tinafey

Meryl Streep is, of course, an eternally popular subject.

The most popular Twitter hashtags were similar, focusing on the red carpet and variations on the official broadcast hashtag, #GoldenGlobes:

The latter is Entertainment Weekly’s official Globes-related hashtag, similar to the approach we saw for Mashable and TechCrunch creating their own CES-related hashtags last week. E! News (#eredcarpet) always runs a popular red carpet countdown show prior to the beginning of the Globes and promotes their hashtags onscreen. (A best practice for any large-scale event, even if you’re just promoting them on conference-wide screens rather than national television.)

The Golden Globes successfully executed their social presence across platforms last night, drawing their engagement on Instagram to new heights using the established platform of Twitter. We can’t wait to see how their social strategy continues to grow and evolve in the next few years!

Want more Golden Globes? Check out our coverage for the 2014 show, 2013, 2012, and 2011, and marvel at how the social times have changed.

At Union Metrics, we can access any tweets in Twitter’s history for TweetReach analytics reporting! So if you’re interested in understanding the impact of tweets about a past campaign or project, we can help. Use this guide to see which TweetReach product you need, depending on when your tweets were posted.

When were the tweets posted?

Recently

If the tweets you’re interested in were posted in thepast week, try running a snapshot report. Snapshot reports are great for recent, smaller events. Free snapshots include up to 50 recent tweets, and our full $20 snapshots will include up to 1500 tweets from the past few days (usually up to a week).

A while ago

If the tweets are more than one week old, you’ll need our premium historical analytics. With our historical Twitter analytics, we access the full Twitter archive and can analyze any public tweets that have ever been posted, dating back to March 2006. Pricing starts at $199 and is based on report duration and total tweet volume. Request a quote or more information here.

In the future

If the tweets haven’t been posted yet, set up a Tracker with our TweetReach Pro Twitter analytics subscriptions. That starts at just $99 per month, which includes real-time, ongoing monitoring for two topics, hashtags, keywords or accounts and up to 100,000 tweets per month. You just need to set up your Tracker before tweets start going out, and we can capture them all. You can see full pricing here.

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics and our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments, or tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.

“Pinterest users are highly active on other social media networks according to Global Web Index. As a result they don’t need the same input from family, friends and colleagues that they get from other social media platforms.”

At some point, your marketing strategies need to converge to give you the best outcomes. For instance, if you are selling software, you can find new customers and educate or inform the existing ones about new products or updates through social media and/or the use of video in creative ways. But, if you sell farming equipment, you might split your marketing efforts into two ways – social media for educating customers, combined with traditional methods like direct mail, banner ads or TV spots to help you do the actual selling.”

“More than half (53%) of B2B enterprise marketers spend fewer than two hours a day engaging with industry content. Moreover, 31% say they probably overestimate how much time they spend with this sort of content.”

“This small victory gives me hope. If a bureaucratic company with 1,000 lawyers like GM can embrace an embarrassment and use social media in a wise and fun way, maybe there is hope for all of us! Here is what they did right:

1) In a PR crisis, they cut through the bureaucracy to let the storytellers, instead of the lawyers, run the show.

2) They responded IMMEDIATELY and set the tone for the reaction. If they had reacted in a formal or legalistic way, they would have become part of the controversy instead of part of the fun. They would have reinforced an image of being stiff and out of touch instead of being playful and cool — like their trucks.

3) Instead of focusing on the bumbling #ChevyGuy and the negative implications for the brand, they hijacked the meme with #TechnologyAndStuff which is still funny but also connects the brand to something positive. And stuff.

In a world where traditional media often pokes fun at social media mess-ups, it is refreshing to see a traditional media mess-up become a social media success story.”

“When doing our business, marketing plan and any given initiative within it justice — do we always slow down and really think through what we are trying to accomplish and why? Do we take the time to lay out the strategy and tactics, and then determine the various (operative word: various) things we should care to learn?”

All TweetReach reporting includes a number of engagement and listening metrics for Twitter. Two of the main metrics we provide are potential reach and impressions. Let’s talk a little more about what reach and impressions are, and why they’re so important to your Twitter strategy.

Reach is the size of the estimated potential unique audience for your tweets. TweetReach calculates reach algorithmically, based on data we’ve been collecting from Twitter for more than five years. It’s the best way of knowing how large your audience on Twitter can be, and takes unique recipients into account.

Impressions measure the size of total potential exposure. This shows you how many total timelines your tweets were delivered to, so it’s a count of the maximum total impressions possible for your tweets.

Both of these estimated audience metrics are essential for understanding the full impact of your tweets, especially when used alongside Twitter’s internal analytics. Here’s how.

Reach and impressions for your Twitter account

Twitter’s analytics calculate actual impressions for each of your Twitter account’s tweets. That shows how many people actually saw that tweet. TweetReach calculates total possible impressions for those tweets. Use actual impressions and potential impressions together to fully understand your impact on Twitter. The number of actual impressions received will vary from tweet to tweet and account to account, but your actual impressions will likely be between 1% and 20% of your potential impressions.

Knowing how your actual impressions compare to your potential impressions shows you exactly how well your tweets are performing, how large your audience is, and how large your audience could be. What’s the ratio of your actual impressions to potential impressions? Are your tweets on the low side? Do some perform better than others? Use this information to determine how you can improve your ratio. Which tweets are seen – and engaged with – by more people? What makes those tweets different? Maybe you used a particular hashtag or included a photo. If so, try doing more of that to see how you can activate more of your potential audience, and improve your ratio of actual to potential impressions.

Additionally, you can use other TweetReach metrics on engagement (like retweets and replies, average retweets rate) and contributors (such as contributors who have engaged the most with your content and generated the highest exposure) to understand not just how far your content is reaching, but how and with whom.

Reach and impressions for competitors’ or influencers’ accounts

While Twitter’s activity dashboard focuses on your own Twitter presence, you can use TweetReach to analyze any Twitter account, including your competitors, influencers in your industry, celebrities, or any other public Twitter account.

Start with a quick share of voice analysis. How do your reach and impressions compare to those of your closest competitor? How about other similar Twitter accounts? Remember these are potential impressions, so know that – just like for your own Twitter account – your competitors’ actual impressions will be a similarly small percentage of their potential impressions.

For a more advanced analysis, dive deeper into competitive intelligence. Run TweetReach reports or Trackers for your competitors, then take a look at the popular content and top contributors in these conversations. What Twitter accounts are engaging with your competitors? Who are they and do you follow them? What hashtags are your competitors using? Are there any new or relevant hashtags you could use? What tweets are resonating in the conversation?

Reach and impressions for hashtags, keywords or other terms

With TweetReach, you can measure more than just a Twitter account – you can measure the impact of anything in a tweet, like a hashtag, a phrase or keyword, even a URL. Twitter’s activity dashboard only includes tweets posted from your account, so you can’t use it to analyze impressions for the overall conversation around a hashtag, for example.

You’re probably using a variety of hashtags in your tweets – some for specific campaigns or events and other more general hashtags to signal participation in a particular industry or conversation. Do you know the reach of those hashtags? With TweetReach, you can understand the potential reach and impressions for any hashtag, which helps you understand the size of the conversation you’re participating in. If a hashtag has a low reach, then you’ll be able to have a large impact in a smaller space. If the hashtag’s reach is high, you’ll less likely to make a big impact in the overall conversation, but you’re participating in a more popular topic. The best Twitter strategy includes a bit of both; use a combination of specific and general hashtags in your tweets to reach the most people.

Interested in learning more about how you can use potential reach and impressions to improve your Twitter strategy? We’d be happy to show you how to use TweetReach’s Twitter analytics to better understand the full impact of your tweets. Let’s talk!

Even if you’re part of a more traditionally minded marketing team, these could inspire some new approaches to your content strategy. Plus, we’ve paired each of these use cases with a more traditional marketing takeaway.

1. Journalism

Use our historical analytics to see how a story broke out on Twitter, and how it spread. How did the people on the ground at the incident share information? Did local and national news sources communicate with them and contact them to be interviewed for newscasts, or did they send their own people ? How were those journalists’ social media reports different from those of civilian witnesses? A journalist who was on Twitter when a story broke and might have most of this information cataloged in screenshots already could use our historical analytics to fill in any remaining gaps in the story. New story leads or witnesses could be discovered in this way, and investigated or interviewed.

Traditional marketing takeaway: This is the same style of research you can employ to see how a social crisis broke and spread on Twitter, and help build your own crisis communication plan accordingly.

2. Comedy

Running low on material? Reach back through past periods on Twitter to rework some old jokes into something new for your next standup show or writing gig. Likewise you can look at another funny person you admire’s timeline to see how their skills developed over time, inspiring new joke styles, approaches to writing, or even just timing.

Traditional marketing takeaway: If it fits with your brand, don’t be afraid to be funny. Have you used humor in your content strategy in the past? See how those tweets performed vs. neutrally toned tweets that were conveying similar types of information. If it doesn’t fit with your brand, don’t force it.

3. Charity

Running a charity campaign on social media is tricky; you want to strike just the right balance of reaching the maximum amount of people in and just outside of your network who might be interested in contributing, without annoying them. Know of a campaign that nailed it? Use historical analytics to sample their campaign, or even study the entirety of it and model your own approach after theirs.

Traditional marketing takeaway: Use this same approach to study a past campaign that your company- or a competitor- has run either successfully or to lackluster results. What worked and what didn’t? Use that to inform how you plan and execute your next campaign in the same space.

Want to get started and learn more?

Fantastic! You can read more about our premium historical analytics here, and even request a quote. And remember, we can analyze anything and everything ever posted to Twitter, all the way back to the very first public Tweet posted in March 2006.

Visual content marketing- particularly in the form of videos- is the hot topic of marketing at the moment. Videos are attention grabbing, and when done well, attention holding. They can elicit strong emotional response. Brands like Budweiser have capitalized on this with their horse-and-puppy friendship Super Bowl commercials. Most brands don’t have the same level of resources, however.

Make the most of the resources you do have and get the most out of the video content your brand shares on Twitter, with these three tips. The best part? They don’t require a multi-million dollar budget or dedicated video team to execute.

1. Tease pieces of a longer video

Drive traffic back to your YouTube channel or website by posting 6-second clips of your full video on Vine, 15-second clips on Instagram, and sharing both of those on your Twitter account. Pick the section of video that will be the most interesting to the audience on each platform, and take note of which one performs best when shared on Twitter.

2. Make a series of shorter videos leading up to a longer one

Even if what you’re planning to release is a longer video that covers different aspects of change in your business structure or that demos a product, you can still use this approach; just film quick 6-15 second clips of stand-ins acting as customers, asking the questions that your longer video will address. Tweet these with the promise that an answer is coming soon, and use them as an opening to get your customers to share their most frequent questions with you so that you can address them.

3. Use Twitter to source material for your next video

Whether you’re just getting into video marketing or your well of content ideas has run dry, Twitter can help you out. Do you host or attend any Twitter chats? Ask the attendees if there is a topic they’d like to see addressed, and plan your next video around it. Consider hosting a weekly Q&A on Twitter where you collect the best questions and have them answered in video format and shared back on Twitter. Use a unique hashtag for your Q&A so you can track the conversation over time, and so your question askers will have an easier time finding the new video answers as you post them.

The bottom line

Twitter is fantastic for amplification of your video messages, and for connecting with your audience in real-time way that isn’t possible with video comment sections.

Does your brand have a successful video content marketing strategy? What tips would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments.

Below: A quick Instagram demo of the visualization of the Union Metrics for Tumblr analytics we had on display in our suite at SXSW 2013.

About TweetReach

TweetReach is brought to you by Union Metrics. We focus on delivering powerful social analytics that enable marketers to measure and improve their social media campaigns. We provide analytics across Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Here on our TweetReach blog, we share our favorite Twitter tactics and strategies, as well as company announcements and events.